New Year’s Concert 2013 (CD review)

The annual New
Year’s concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic date back to somewhere between the
Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras. Or so it seems. Actually, the tradition got
started in 1941 and has been going strong ever since. Companies recording the
concerts over the past few decades have included EMI, RCA, DG, Decca, and Sony;
and, of course, the orchestra invites a different conductor to perform the
duties each year. These conductors in recent years have included some of the
biggest names in the business, including Carlos Kleiber, Willi Boskovsky,
Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Seiji Ozawa,
Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim, Georges Pretre, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mariss
Jansons, and 2013’s maestro, Franz Welser-Most.

Welser-Most also conducted the 2011 concert, so he’s no
stranger to the proceedings. What’s more, in addition to his post as Music
Director of the Cleveland Orchestra, he is presently the General Music Director
of the Vienna State Opera and has strong family links to Johann Strauss
ancestry dating back to the early nineteenth century. You might say that music,
and especially the music of Vienna, is in Welser-Most’s blood.

For 2013’s concert, Welser-Most and the concert’s
organizers divided the program into two major sections: The first part contains
the usual Strauss, Suppe, and Lanner tunes; the second part celebrates the
200th anniversary of both Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi with samples of
their music interspersed with Strauss numbers. Sony recorded almost all of the
concert, twenty selections, in this two-disc set.

Things get off to a typically rousing start with Josef
Strauss’s Soubrette polka, a lively
and explosive affair. Next, we hear Johann Strauss Jr.’s Kiss Waltz, one of the Waltz King’s sweeter concoctions. And so it
goes through polkas, waltzes, quadrilles, dances, galops, fantasies, and
marches. Welser-Most breaks up the Strauss family music with tunes from Franz
von Suppe (The Light Cavalry Overture),
Wagner (Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin), Joseph Hellmesberger (Between the Two of Us polka), Joseph
Lanner (Styrian Dances), and Verdi (Battle Music from Act III of Don Carlo).

My own favorites among the selections include the
aforementioned Kiss Waltz, Josef
Strauss’s Music of the Spheres waltz
and The Spinner polka, and Strauss
Jr.’s lovely Hesperus’ Path Waltz.

Naturally, the festivities end with the inevitable Blue DanubeWaltz and then the Radetzky
March, as always with the audience joyously joining in. Welser-Most
maintains the high standard of these affairs with vigorous, buoyant
performances, and the Vienna Philharmonic play as faultlessly as ever.

Teldex Studio Berlin recorded the performance live for
Sony Classical on January 1, 2013, in the Goldener Saal des Wiener
Musikvereins. Normally, I’m not fond of live recordings, but once a year, every
year, I make an exception for the New Year’s concert by the Vienna
Philharmonic. The set is not so much a recording of music as it is a recording of an event, and as such I suppose one
can cut it a little slack in terms of ultimate fidelity. Most live recordings
try to minimize audience noise; this one doesn’t. Indeed, it positively revels
in it, reminding the home listener at every opportunity that there is a live
audience at the concert enjoying every minute of the proceedings with their
applause and laughter.

The engineers miked the orchestra fairly close-up and
obtain a very big sound, with an enormous dynamic range and huge impact. The
result is quite spectacular and provides plenty of visceral musical thrills.
There is not a lot of depth, air, or even hall ambience involved, though, so
don’t expect a particularly realistic offering here. Although the strings are
somewhat bright, thin, and forward, we might expect that, given the
circumstances.

No comments:

Post a Comment

John J. Puccio

About the Author

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on The Big John and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job.

Contact Information

Readers with polite, courteous, helpful letters may send them to pucciojj@gmail.com.